Programming Archipelago: Digital Visual Cultures and Nationalism in Indonesia

Programming Archipelago explores how practices in computer programming have transposed the ways in which narratives of nationalism are constructed visually and conceptually in everyday public discourse in post-authoritarian Indonesia (1998-present) by examining the emergence of "digital nationalism"-a new mode for imagining the construction of national identity through the mediation of software codes and algorithms. As an emerging economic power, Indonesia has been expressly enthralled by the use of digital technologies as an avenue for political and cultural participation after the fall of Suharto's regime in 1998. When Indonesian student activists used the internet as an alternative medium for organizing their protests that led to the collapse of the regime, the moment represents a significant instance of the Indonesian people's on-going experimentation with digital media as a conceivably empowering medium. This dissertation sets up from this moment of transformation to chart changing conceptions of nationalism in popular discourse propagated by the logic of computer programming. Instead of focusing mainly on the causal effects of digital nationalism in the realm of Indonesian politics, this study scrutinizes the process of this experimentation to show the significance of software and its programmability in redefining Indonesian archipelagic identity. Using approaches in software studies and digital ethnography, this dissertation demonstrates how technological affordances of three digital media formats-Free Open Source Software (FOSS), video games, and social media-have portrayed Indonesian nationalism in ways that highlight three most basic aspects of digital media use: open, playable, and distributed. Consequently, it highlights how optimism in the projects of constructing "digital Indonesian archipelago" elucidates the under-examined relationship between "post-nationalist" views of contemporary digital collaboration and the nationalistic aspirations of the Indonesian digital generation. Exploring the relationship between computer programming and the collective imagining of nationhood is a central goal of Programming Archipelago. Through its readings of multiple figurations of digital nationalism, this dissertation produces a more nuanced account of how people in non-western contexts deal with the portrayal of the digital as a liberating technology in our contemporary era. In the end, it demonstrates the continued and unstable entanglement between technological visions and identity formations.